Title
Gaussian process hyper-parameter estimation using parallel asymptotically independent Markov sampling
Abstract
Gaussian process emulators of computationally expensive computer codes provide fast statistical approximations to model physical processes. The training of these surrogates depends on the set of design points chosen to run the simulator. Due to computational cost, such training set is bound to be limited and quantifying the resulting uncertainty in the hyper-parameters of the emulator by uni-modal distributions is likely to induce bias. In order to quantify this uncertainty, this paper proposes a computationally efficient sampler based on an extension of Asymptotically Independent Markov Sampling, a recently developed algorithm for Bayesian inference. Structural uncertainty of the emulator is obtained as a by-product of the Bayesian treatment of the hyper-parameters. Additionally, the user can choose to perform stochastic optimisation to sample from a neighbourhood of the Maximum a Posteriori estimate, even in the presence of multimodality. Model uncertainty is also acknowledged through numerical stabilisation measures by including a nugget term in the formulation of the probability model. The efficiency of the proposed sampler is illustrated in examples where multi-modal distributions are encountered. For the purpose of reproducibility, further development, and use in other applications the code used to generate the examples is freely available for download at https://github.com/agarbuno/paims_codes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1016/j.csda.2016.05.019
Computational Statistics & Data Analysis
Keywords
Field
DocType
Gaussian process,Hyper-parameter,Marginalisation,Optimisation,MCMC,Simulated annealing
Econometrics,Mathematical optimization,Bayesian inference,Markov chain Monte Carlo,Hyperparameter,Markov chain,Sampling (statistics),Gaussian process,Maximum a posteriori estimation,Statistics,Mathematics,Bayesian probability
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
103
C
0167-9473
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
3
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
a garbunoinigo100.34
f a diazdelao200.34
Konstantin Zuev3132.09